John O'Boyle/The Star-LedgerChaz Fudge, who is believed to have developed lung cancer from asbestos inhalation during the 9/11 attacks, revisits Ground Zero Tuesday.

NEW YORK — Just outside the World Trade Center construction site, Chaz Fudge Jr. lit up a Newport 100 and took a long pull.

"I quit smoking, but I’m a little nervous today," the former Newark resident and telecommunications executive said Tuesday afternoon.

Fudge had come from Philadelphia, where he now lives, to pay his respects, he said, to the people killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks in lower Manhattan.

He also came to say goodbye.

Fudge, 51, has stage four lung cancer. Translated into time, doctors say he has another six months to a year to live.

Returning to the World Trade Center site for the first time since the attacks, he said, would help bring some measure of closure.

"I wanted to see it, feel their spirit," he said of the 2,753 people killed in New York City that clear September day. "I wanted to say ‘thank you.’ "

Fudge, an analyst with Metropolitan Telecommunications, was attending a meeting on the 82nd floor of the north tower when the first plane slammed into the building, 11 floors above.

He was hit on the shoulder and incapacitated by falling debris. A firewall, he said, saved him and his colleagues from death that day. A firefighter would carry him down to safety.

But Fudge’s injuries stayed with him for months. He broke several bones and was in and out of hospitals for treatment. His wife, a teacher at Edison High School, also helped nurture him back to relative health.

A little more than two years after the attacks, though, she developed breast cancer. She died in August 2004.

Within a year, Fudge’s father and mother also passed away and Fudge was left to care for his three sons, including then-13-year-old Chaz Fudge III, on his own.

John O'Boyle/The Star-LedgerChaz Fudge, who is believed to have developed lung cancer from asbestos inhalation during the 9/11 attacks, looks at the area where the Twin Towers once stood during a visit to Ground Zero Tuesday.

Then, last year, doctors at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York diagnosed his cancer, which they said was probably caused by asbestos he inhaled while inside the burning tower.

But a final reckoning would have to wait. Fudge had vowed to help put young Chaz through college.

Tuesday, inside the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, Fudge twice kneeled to the granite ground, overcome by emotion. In tones just above a whisper, he talked about the carnage, "the blood" and "the bodies."

Wearing a dark turtleneck, blue blazer and overcoat, Fudge walked to a corner of the South Pool, accompanied by Chaz III, now 21; Joe Daniels, president of the memorial foundation; and Thomas Rollerson, president of the California-based Dream Foundation, which paid for and facilitated Fudge’s trip.

Under cloudy skies, with the sun’s light occasionally refracting against glass towers again reaching skyward, Fudge peered into the waterfalls. Hand over hand, he ran his fingers along the names engraved on the southwest corner of the bronze parapet. He kissed them.

Fudge, a gold hoop through his left earlobe and a feather in his fedora, then took a walk on the 8-acre grounds, greeting and thanking every police officer he saw.

"It could have been me," he said. "This is bittersweet. … Just to see this is very humbling."

Chaz III, an accomplished wrestler, is a sophomore at Philadelphia Community College. He hopes to transfer to Drexel University, where he wants to major in engineering.

Fudge, who lettered in three sports and was class president at Barringer High School in Newark, said that despite the emotional and financial burdens, and now his physical pain, fulfilling the promise of his son’s education gives him the will to battle.

"I’m obsessed with that," he said. "I’m not rushing, but I’m asking God for that longevity."